Lyly’s style was pithy and sententious, and his sentences have the air of proverbs or epigrams.  The vice of Euphuism was its monotony.  On every page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable; but many pages of such writing became tiresome.  Yet it did much to form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point and polish.  His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in Shakspere’s comic dialogue.  In 1580 appeared the second part, Euphues and his England, and six editions of the whole work were printed before 1598.  Lyly had many imitators.  In Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, a tract directed against the stage and published about four months later than the first part of Euphues, the language is directly Euphuistic.  The dramatist, Robert Greene, published, in 1587, his Menaphon; Camilla’s Alarum to Slumbering Euphues, and his Euphues’s Censure to Philautus.  His brother dramatist, Thomas Lodge, published, in 1590, Rosalynde:  Euphues’s Golden Legacy, from which Shakspere took the plot of As You Like It.  Shakspere and Ben Jonson both quote from Euphues in their plays, and Shakspere was really writing Euphuism when he wrote such a sentence as “’Tis true, ’tis pity; pity ’tis ’tis true.”

[Illustration:  Chaucer, Spenser, Bacon, Milton.]

That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England.  He was scholar, poet, courtier, diplomatist, soldier, all in one.  Educated at Oxford and then introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, he had been sent to France when a lad of eighteen, with the embassy which went to treat of the queen’s proposed marriage to the Duke of Alencon, and was in Paris at the time of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in 1572.  Afterward he had traveled through Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, had gone as embassador to the emperor’s court, and every-where won golden opinions.  In 1580, while visiting his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote, for her pleasure, the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, which remained in manuscript till 1590.  This was a pastoral romance, after the manner of the Italian Arcadia of Sanazzaro, and the Diana Enamorada of Montemayor, a Portuguese author.  It was in prose, but intermixed with songs and sonnets, and Sidney finished only two books and a portion of the third.  It describes the adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who were wrecked on the coast of Sparta.  The plot is very involved and is full of the stock episodes of romance:  disguises, surprises, love intrigues, battles, jousts and single combats.  Although the insurrection of the Helots against the Spartans forms a part of the story, the Arcadia is not the real Arcadia of the Hellenic Peloponnesus, but the fanciful country of pastoral romance, an unreal clime, like the fairy land of Spenser.